Theories of Probabilities

Chinchu Zorba Rosa

You are now a wing that lost its way to descend at an odd time in the waiting room of an ancient railway station. A tired pink-dotted dark wing looking for probables amidst the unbearable sizzling winds and whiff of cheap talcum powder.

You or me constitute a Constant whose value cannot be altered by addition multiplication or division, a first rate fraction. The philosophy of probables is a unilateral one as nauseating as the jasmine garlands failing to call the owner/the woman’s body by name.

The man who will arrive now is a second grade probability. It is necessary to select one in the vast scope of a term like lover/adulterer that renders the rest improbables, victims! Ah, this world! brimming with endless options. How to strike up a conversation? Not with the eyes, let the violet beanstalks of the brassier on the wet bosom do the bargaining. Let the black ants show the way to the piggybank from the underbelly. Come, be my debaucher, my lover for a single night.

Same-sex lovers whistle and vomit out the bygone nights. Changed into a new dress when it was twenty four minutes past four. Voices board and alight like a python. People with sturdy bodies and feminine minds. Transgender train with heavy breasts and thick pricks. Five thirty. The scene alters dramatically in Shornur rail station. Humans take form in the red light. They split into men and women.

Journey resumes towards the mountain slopes hiding the organs of the hooting train. A transgender named The West Coast Express hiding full breasts and stunted pricks vanishes.

Chinchu Rosa has been published in print weeklies in Malayalam, and I have translated some of her poems before. One such poem has also been translated into German. Her themes usually deal strongly with man-woman love (in an unromantic way) and she has established a language of her own. However, this poem is a departure. Taking place at night, on a platform and inside a train, it describes a transgender sex worker trying to solicit a customer. This image is interrupted by the arrival of more transgenders boarding the train. This is a world of uncertainties and probabilities filled with filth and violence, seclusion and rejection. At the end of the poem, even the train assumes a transgender character. It is a challenge to translate such works, written by a cis-gendered woman, but dealing with the struggles of a transgender person within.

Chinchu Zorba Rosa works as a lecturer in Mangalore and writes poems in her spare time. Her poems deal with female sexuality and gender politics, and they regularly appear on social media. One of her poems appeared in German in the journal STRASSENSTIMMEN Vol. 6 in 2015.

Ra Sh (Ravi Shanker N) has published English-language poems in many national and international online and print magazines, such as Kindle magazine, the German online journal STRASSENSTIMMEN, and Indian Literature, among others. His poems have been translated into German and French. Fifteen poems appear in an anthology, A Strange Place Other Than Earlobes, published by Sampark, Kolkata. His translations into English include Mother Forest (the biography of C. K. Janu) and Harum-Scarum Saar and Other Stories (stories by Tamil writer Bama), both published by Women Unlimited, Delhi; and Waking is Another Dream (Sri Lankan Tamil poems translated along with Meena Kandaswamy), published by Navayana, Delhi. Ra Sh translated and edited translations of thirty-seven young Malayali poets for RædLeafPoetry-India in 2015. His collection of poems, Architecture of Flesh, was also published by Poetrywala, Mumbai, in December 2015.